Mday, Sept 15 2003

Yeah, yeah

My life is in kind of a holding pattern.

I’m waiting for something good to happen. Actually, I’m waiting for anything at all to happen… I’ve put in the applications, so I’m waiting for That Call, the one that gets me towards a boring job where I’ll be miserable eight hours a day, but, on the other hand, where I can get my own apartment to be by myself in and not be miserable listening to Paul’s friend Scott talk about his sex life whenever he comes over, which is way too goddam often lately.

There are always vague feelings of guilt when I’m unemployed. I should be out looking for work harder. Putting in more applications. Checking the classifieds. Calling up the places where I’ve applied and shaking the tree harder. Doing something. There’s always more I could be doing, and since mostly what I am doing these days is sitting around with my thumb in my ass, well… guilt. Vague feelings of.

I’m not qualifying getting a job, especially at Wal-mart, as ‘something good’, though. ‘Something good’ would be, I don’t know, someone wanting to pay me for something I wrote. That would be good. Or some woman I’m actually attracted to being attracted to me back. That would also be good. Winning the Lotto would also be something good. Doesn’t have to be one of the big prizes. I’ll take $3 million. No problem there. Everyone will get stiffed on the big expensive presents deal, but what the hell, I don’t have many friends anyway.

So I’m sitting here on my ass, waiting. It’s not like I haven’t done the work. I’ve filled out the job applications. Bought the Lotto tickets. Written the short stories and articles and novels, and posted them on the Internet. And I’m just waiting, waiting, waiting, for something good to happen. Good things happen to other people. I read about it in the paper. Why not me?

DROP KICK ME, JESUS

It’s time to become a serious Bills fan again.

I mean it. This Bucs shit is just going to kill me. Bucs games will give me an ulcer and an aneurysm at the same time. They just grind. They’re frustrating and aggravating. I mean, holy shit, yesterday the Bucs couldn’t get a single fucking touchdown until, literally, the very last instant of the game. (I’m serious. No time left on the clock when Johnson connects with McCardell in the end zone, something they hadn’t managed to do for the entire previous game.)

The game before against the Eagles was bad enough, with the Bucs unable to do a goddam thing until the third quarter. Aggravating. Annoying. Frustrating. It made you want to scream and punch the hell out of someone. But hey, at least they finally got their thumbs out and won.

Yesterday. HOLY SHIT. We got nothing. All game long, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. The Bucs start a drive, they convert some first downs, they get a little momentum and a little rhythm going, they get a stupid penalty. Carolina stalls them. FUCKING Panthers. The Bucs do the same thing to them, but at least the stinking worthless Panthers can kick field goals. The Bucs can’t kick field goals; the wretched miserable no good Panthers block two of them. BASTARDS. 9 to 3 going into the last seconds of the game and Keyshawn Johnson drops an easy pass in the endzone. 13 seconds on the clock and Keyshawn DROPS THE FUCKING PASS. Two plays later with NO TIME AT ALL LEFT, Johnson connects to McCardell, FINALLY. They review it. I’m screaming at the TV, ranting and raving. They uphold it. It’s a touchdown. There is NO TIME LEFT IN THE GAME, but the Bucs get to kick the extra point, and that will win the game for them.

But, no. The cocksucking piece of shit Carolina Panthers just HAVE to BLOCK THE EXTRA POINT.

How often does that happen? I’ll tell you how often; NEVER. Martin Gramatica had never previously in his history as a kicker had an extra point kick blocked. NEVER. NOT ONCE, NOT EVER. No time on the clock, the end of an ugly, frustrating, aggravating, nasty, brutal, penalty filled horrible horrible football game that was NEVER, EVER fun to watch… NO decent plays, no break outs, no long passes, no long runs, nothing, just defense, defense, defense, and penalties, penalties, penalties… I swear to God if every professional football game looked like that… if HALF of them looked like that… football would go bankrupt in a season. No one would buy tickets. No one would watch. What a HORRIBLE game.

AND THE FUCKING PANTHERS BLOCK THE EXTRA POINT.

And the Bucs can’t do shit in overtime and the christly nutslicking Panthers kick a field goal and the Bucs lose.

There is no God. At least, no loving and merciful God. I mean, the Bucs get a touchdown in the last possible instant of the game to tie it up, the extra point should be a gimme, and the CAROLINA PANTHERS BLOCK THE EXTRA POINT and go on to win in overtime.

Oh, and just for garnish, Joe Jurevicius gets hurt running into Mike Alstott and now he's out for four to six weeks. Yay.

The universe is an empty howling void of cruelty and despair. God is a mental defective with a third grade sense of humor, endlessly feeding firecrackers wrapped in bread to unsuspecting pigeons. The Carolina Panthers should be roasting on spits in hell, and their special teams players should all have apples in their mouths.

And the Bucs just plain suck.

Now, the Bills don’t do this. The Bills play the kind of football I want to watch. They come out, they hammer the living shit out of their opponents, they score early, get out in front, and never look back. They float like butterflies, sting like bees, and they do not give me acid indigestion or cause me to scream until the window glass vibrates and Paul’s dog looks at me as if wondering if I’ll explode. If I could actually WATCH a Bills game this year without getting cable, I would abandon the Bucs precipitously and do nothing but watch the Bills. Bills Bills Bills Bills Bills.

But I live in Tampa and can’t watch Bills games, and anyway, the Bucs just pretty much HAVE to beat the living shit out of the Falcons next week, right?

I actually feel sorry for the Falcons. The Bucs are going to be in a really shitty mood when they roll into Atlanta next Sunday. They’re going to take the giant economy size can of whup ass up there with them. It won’t be a football game, it will be a lynching.

And then, quite a while later (the Bucs have a bye) they do Indianapolis at home, on Monday night. The Bucs should crush them. They kind of need to, since the Colts are now Tony Dungy’s team.

FUCKING Carolina Panthers.

Go Bills.

EDITORS AND OTHER IDIOTS

I’ve asked my publisher on the Website Which Must Not Be Named if he could give me an advance on the next quarter’s check. I haven’t heard back from him yet, and have no idea what he’ll say. He’s given advances to other people who write for the site before, but he and I aren’t exactly tight. I could seriously use the money, which probably means he’ll turn me down. But we’ll see.

Jonathan continues to not give me a goddam thing, the putz. And the guy at Speedmonkey.com… well, I have no expectations there. If he won’t give me a byline, I’m obviously not going to pick up any more attention from exposure on his site, and I seriously doubt he’ll ever pay me anything.

In very very very minor good news, Karen Sisco is on Wednesdays at 10. This is good, it means I can watch it. I suspect it won’t last longer than three or four episodes, but still, three or four episodes of Carla Guigino in tight clothing is better than an old tin bucket full of three day old fish heads.

Wow. They just did a staggeringly stupid mob thing to open up Monday Night Football.

What I find amusing is that I started to say “Godfather” instead of “mob”, then went through this whole ‘no, these days that should be Goodfellas instead of Godfather… no, wait, it should be Sopranos…” Then I just decided to go with ‘mob’.

I’m currently rereading Steven Brust’s Jhereg. I’ll reread Yendi next. After that, the series gets kind of tedious as suddenly Brust decides to get very very serious with his fantasy world and completely loses his sense of whimsy and humor. But, Jhereg and Yendi are always fun to read.

Oh, Paul and I got a ride out to Wal-mart last night to do some grocery shopping, and Paul found a copy of Galaxy Quest on DVD. So he’s happy. There were some really cool deleted scenes on the disc, too.

The Giants are looking a great deal like shit so far this game. And of course the Cowboys can’t fucking play. This game looks like being a battle of the bozos.

I find a great many commercials annoying. But there’s this one car commercial that especially aggravates me. The nerdy looking guy with the gorgeous girlfriend is obviously really enjoying driving his car. She whines and whines until he stops and gets out and looks for the camera she thinks maybe they left at home. When he gets back to the driver’s seat, she’s all strapped in with the door locked, and just gives him this innocent little ‘gosh, you’re soooo stupid’ look through the window.

Now, this is why I don’t have relationships. Because if I were sleeping with someone that selfish and manipulative and mean, well, I wouldn’t have simply shrugged, said “You’re good” the way the nutless wonder in this commercial did, and walked around to get in the passenger side. I would have looked at her calmly… then walked around to the back of the car again, gotten my shit out, and started walking towards the nearest town.

I mean, honestly. She plays on his nice guy impulse. He does her a favor. And she makes him look like a complete asshole for being a nice guy, and then gives him a little smirk when she does it, like “yes, you really are that goddam dumb, but aren’t I sooooooo cute?”

Well, it’s a commercial. People in real relationships probably wouldn’t pull shit like this on each other. All I know is, if someone pulled that crap on me, we’d be done.

LATE BREAKING UPDATES:

The Giants-Cowboys thing has turned out to be a game. They're in OT right now, which sucks, because it looked like the Giants had a miracle comeback and victory, and then a blown punt let the stinking worthless piece of shit Cowboys come back and tie it with nothing on the clock. Now in overtime the Cowboys look like they're going to win; the Giants seem to have nothing left to throw at them. This sucks. Well, it kind of sucks. I still can't forgive the Giants for stealing that goddam Super Bowl from the Bills back in... what? 1990? Pricks. But I'd always rather see a New York team win. It looks like the Cowboys are going to do it, though. Which sucks. I loathe the Cowboys, and I loathe Bill Parcells. I really wanted to see him and his new boys get an asswhipping. Oh, well. Bad weekend for football, I guess.

In worse news, the Publisher Who Must Not Be Named has always been pretty much an asshole (those who have read my private blog have heard me vent about him before; he's really a fairly loathsome human being). I've mentioned lately that he's always paid me what he's said he's going to pay me pretty much on time, and he has. But he's also pretty much always been a bullying swaggering prick. More than that, I've written a lot of very popular material for him, and I needed a big favor from him right now, and he just sent me an email telling me he just won't do it. I'm sure he thinks he has good reasons, but this is a real gut punch.

Just to give you an idea what sort of a guy he is, here's a quote from one of his latest posts, in which he's gloating (and doing it badly because he doesn't write at all well) about how he's recently bullied a former close friend of his into leaving the site:

The dust always settles, eventually. And I am always the one standing there when the air clears, like Clint Eastwood.
The real question is, will the Bad & Ugly be standing there when the dust finally clears ?
------------------
"I'll tell you in another life, when we are both cats." - Sofia (Vanilla Sky)
"Beware of Darkness" by George Harrison
The last two quote lines are his pre-programmed sign off. He really seems to feel that that particular line from Vanilla Sky is deeply profound, or something. And I don't know what his deal is with the Harrison thing. But hopefully, that gives you the flavor of his shallow, mean, twisted, utterly self centered and completely humorless little psyche.

And I mean, honestly, just let me fume about this a little while longer. I didn't ask him for a LOAN. He pays people on a quarterly basis. I have uploaded thirteen stories totalling 185K of material to his site since the start of the last quarter in August, and according to his latest stat sheets those stories have each been downloaded more than 500 times since then... about half of them are over 1,000 downloads apiece. (I'm one of the most popular authors on the site; almost certainly simply because most porn authors don't write very well.) Even given the niggardly, miserly way he figures author share of his site's revenue, I have AT LEAST $500 currently on his books, which I will not see a penny of until sometime in November... but I need it NOW.

Now, real quickly... he has around 4,000 subscribers. Subscription costs vary, but you can peg it at around $8 per month on average. That's $32,000 A MONTH (conservatively) he has rolling in, and it's all virtual cash (credit card payments, basically) so that money is there no matter what, it's right there in his bank account at the speed of light, every month. He pays every three months, dividing his author's pot among several hundred contributors, of which I have consistently been in the top four since I started posting stories. That means that, every three months, conservatively, he's making about $100,000 off his authors.

Now, the overhead on running a website isn't much compared to other businesses, and I know the author's pot he divides amongst his contributors is around a third to a half of what he makes, so he keeps 2/3s to 1/2 of that money. He takes expenses out of it, but still... around $200,000 to $300,000 a year, out of a website where you basically sell other people's work, ain't exactly chump change.

And, you know, he can't give me, consistently one of his four most popular producers, a lousy $500. Which I have already earned anyway.

I just cannot get a break from anyone, here.

And the fucking Cowboys just won, too. Assholes.

I'm still waiting for something good to happen. Anything. Something. But hey. Other people have worse problems than I do. I guess I need to keep reminding myself of that.

Satrday, Sept 13 2003

I seem to have forgotten to archive the Sept 10 page, with the comment on 9/11 wallowing that Mel liked so much. Either that, or the National Secret Cyber Police didn't think it was patriotic and deleted it from my web shell. Either way, apparently that day's whining is now lost for good, unless someone has a copy in their History folder or something.

Beyond that, I got nothin' for ya. Email's been paralytic lately and apparently no one wants to comment on this blog, so, I'm just going to sit here and pout.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man